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It's honestly amazing that we had GPRS video calls in the late 2000s but still don't have them in the era of the smartphone. And a company like Google keeps reinventing messaging which was a solved problem in the early 2000s.
Google was positioned to make Hangouts the dominant messaging and video call app, then just... stopped. I'm kind of glad that's not an area dominated by Google, but I find the decision really bizarre.
Not really.
There plenty of resources if you want to video call. WhatsApp, TG, Signal or even (lol) Skype, have videocalls.
It's just that why would you?
Most calls you definitely don't need video, and often it'd be a downright negative thing. You need to look at the screen and look presentable, as opposed to being able to do things while on the phone.
The reason videocalls aren't more popular is the same exact reason Google Glass isn't.
Well, yeah, no shit. Apps had to replace what was a native phone functionality. But it's still true we lost something. You need a data plan to make video calls while before you could have just your minutes. Of course, it's rare that someone has no data plan but still. Phone calls are still useful even if you mostly to calls via apps.
"What was a native phone functionality"
I've always had video calls on my native messenger since they became a thing.
They've never "gone" anywhere.
I'm from Finland, where Nokia is from. Mobile phone usage was higher here than pretty much anywhere since the 90's. The later Nokias had video calls, but as you say, they wouldn't have gone on the data plan, but charged as minutes (but not normal minutes, just like MMS was more expensive than std SMS).
The apps became more popular exactly for that reason; everything was on your data (which is unlimited), and not charged as SMS or minutes. A lot of the people I know don't even do regular phone calls anymore, just using WhatsApp to call.
So yeah, no-one just used videocalls. What's the point?
There's ViLTE to provide exactly that. I don't know of many (any) carriers that offer it, though. Maybe in some business use cases?
One reason not to use it: there's basically no encryption on any of it. Your carrier, government, and anyone who can get into the network can listen and watch along, just like they can with any voice call, unlike any modern messenger and mobile video calling apps. Hell, even Telegram has decent encryption for their video calls and they can't even encrypt their group chats.
WCDMA, (384kbps/384kbps) but yeah. The standard is still in the 3GPP spec too. Phones could be using it now if carriers and handset manufacturers (mostly crApple) just reimplemented it.
And of course it could have improved over time. I guess moving to a more versatile protocol (Internet) was inevitable.